Once you make a form of communication asynchronous, you can also increase the variety and selection possibilities … The highway will enable capabilities that seem magical when they are described, but represent technology at work to make our lives easier and better … Video on demand will be an important application on the information highway.
At some point not far in the future, a single wire running into each home will be able to deliver all of a household’s digital data. The wire will either be fiber, which is what long distance telephone calls are carried on now, or coaxial cable … That single wire bringing the network will certainly carry much more than phone calls, movies, news. But we can no more imagine what the information highway will carry in 25 years than a Stone Age man using a crude knife could have envision Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors in Florence.
You will be able to stay in touch with anyone, anywhere, who wants to stay in touch with you; to browse through any of thousands of libraries, day or night. Your misplaced or stolen camera will send you a message telling you exactly where it is, even if it’s in a different city. You’ll be able to answer your apartment intercom from your office, or answer any mail from your home. Information that today is difficult to retrieve will be easy to find.
The telephone was a major advance in two-way communication. But at first, even it was denounced as nothing more than a nuisance … As I write, a newer form of communication Ð electronic mail, e-mail, is undergoing the same sort of process: establishing its own rules and habits É The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg’s press did the Middle Ages.
Your workplace and your idea of what it means to be “educated” will be transformed, perhaps almost beyond recognition. Your sense of identity, of who you are and where you belong, may open considerably. In short, just about everything will be done differently.
The global information market will be huge and will combine all the various ways of human goods, services, and ideas are exchanged. On a practical level, this will give you broader choices about most things, including how you earn and invest, what you buy and how much you pay for it, who your friends are and how you spend your time with them, and where and how securely you and your family live.
When you hear the phrase “information highway,” rather than seeing a road, imagine a marketplace or an exchange … All manner of human activity takes place, from billion-dollar deals to flirtations. Many transactions will involve money, tendered in digital form rather than currency. Digital information of all kinds, not just money, will be the new medium of exchange in this market.
A different metaphor that I think comes closer to describing a lot of the activities that will take place is that of the ultimate market. Markets from trading floors to malls are fundamental to human society, and I believe this new one will eventually be the world’s central department store. It will be where we social animals, sell, trade, invest, haggle, pick stuff up, argue, meet new people, and hang out.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this new communications technology is that it will eliminate distance. It won’t matter if someone you are contacting is in the next room or the next continent, because this highly mediated network will be unconstrained by miles and kilometers.
Informational tools are symbolic mediators that amplify the intellect rather than the muscle of their users … these tools … are helping us now by making it much easier to store and transmit information that is already in digital form, but in the near future they will allow us access to almost any information in the world.